Shay's eyes pop wide. “Wh-what?”
Shadi side-eyes Khawla. He sighs. “You didn't tell her?”
“Oh, right.” Khawla grimaces, raising her palms by way of apology. “Shadi's mother is the Morchidat.”
“The who?” Shay doesn't know why the title causes dread to pool in her stomach, but something tells her the reaction is not unwarranted.
“Don't mind the scary-sounding designation. She's the leader of the Sisterhood of the Keepers,” Shadi clarifies. “And I'm sure she would be very interested in seeing the hjabat and hearing about your experience.”
Shadi is the son of their faction's leader?
Shay takes a moment to absorb that news before she considers what he's asking of her. It seems to Shay too big a step, one that could entail more than a simple meeting. Once she gets entangled with the resistance, it may be hard or even impossible to walk away from them.
Her thoughts rattle around like noisy ghosts. Just look at what she almost did earlier tonight when offered Snow. Her behavior wasn't exactly a sign of stellar judgement.
She needs time to think this through. “When do you want me to go?”
Shadi ducks into his shoulders and looks up at Shay through his dark lashes. “Now-ish? Would be good.”
Now.
If only there were somewhere Shay could go to seek good counsel. She needs the advice of someone with a level head, with wisdom. Someone without political loyalties. And the only person she can think of is the one she left behind without so much as a proper goodbye so she could chase some childish dream of a mother's love.
Ghita.
A sharp ache overtakes Shay's chest.
The midwife may not be perfect, but she is honorable.
“It's just that Mmi—the Morchidat—happens to be visiting Nezjar on business,” Shadi elaborates, hinting that the timing is a rare stroke of good luck.
Shay looks from Shadi's earnest face to Khawla's careful expression and down at the ring, as if the Lallat might spontaneously reappear with words of wisdom to impart. She closes her eyes in a long blink before opening them. “Do we have time for another stop first? There is someone else in Nezjar I must see.”
It's well past time she made things right.
18
That school in which you studied, I'm the one who built it.
—Ghita Bensultana
The route to Ghita's apartment draws them away from the crowds, down alleys where moonlight turns blue walls to glacial ice. The din of the revelry follows them, carried between buildings, testifying to a festival at its height with no sign of slowing.
Shay tries to internally prepare herself. She rehearses what she will say to the midwife, how she will explain herself, but as they near their destination, another, deeper, apprehension tugs at her. It hangs like a heavy cape around her shoulders, dragging behind her every step. She doesn't see or hear or smell anything she can point to as being out of the ordinary, but a foreboding disrupts her thoughts, insisting that something is deeply wrong.
Finally, Shay stands before the same door she walked through countless times, bearing fresh cuts on her fingers and a bundle of foraged herbs in herarms, or sporting the puffy eyes of a sleepless night and the smiling lips of a successful birth.
Black paint confirms that tragedy has struck. Illuminated by watery moonbeams, two crisscrossed slashes mar the door's wooden surface. A symbol that declares a building unsafe to enter, either due to structural collapse or because someone has been quarantined with infection.
Shay glances at Shadi and Khawla to find them glancing back and forth at each other, their wide eyes pearled by silver shadows. She knocks softly on the door and pauses, listening. Then she calls out, “Khalti, are you there?”
She knocks louder, calls out more urgently, “Ghita, it's me, Shay. Are you well?”
Their neighbor Zaytuna pokes her head out from the upstairs window. “It's late! What's this commotion about?”
“Khalti,” Shay says with some relief. “I'm very sorry to disturb you, but I'm looking for the midwife.”
“Are you with child?”
